A Famine Not of Bread

Click here to listen to this sermon. Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ! The strife is o’er, the battle done; / Now is the victor’s triumph won; Now be the song of praise begun. / Alleluia! ( LSB 464 st. 1) How fitting to sing these words on a day like this, a day of sorrow and mourning, yes, but also a day of joy, praise, and thanksgiving to God for all the blessings He bestowed upon Fay for Christ’s sake, and to you, Ron, Judy, Gary, Tim, others family members and friends as exhibited through Fay’s faith, love, and life of service to God and her neighbor. Though we will miss Fay’s infectious smile and her joyful spirit, we take great comfort in the fact that she has gone to be in the presence of our Lord, where there is no mourning, crying, pain, or death anymore. And we look forward to the Last Day, the Day of Resurrection. As you can read in her obituary, Fay was an active member of Our Saviour’s Lutheran Church. Over the years, she helped w...

Click here to listen to this sermon. "The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters. He restores my soul. He leads me in paths of righteousness for His name’s sake. Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for You are with me; Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me. You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever” (Psalm 23). Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ! Psalm 23 is the most familiar of all the psalms, and like an old friend, many of us have known it since childhood. This is the psalm that we want to hear when we are facing our own mortality, or lying in a hospital bed, or overwhelmed by disaster, or stricken with grief, or standing at the grave of a ...

Click here to listen to this sermon.   Ephesians 2:1–10 And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience— among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. ...

Click here to listen to this sermon. “For we know that if the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens” (2 Corinthians 5:1). Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ! My wife does not do camping in a tent. She has made that perfectly clear: “Why spend the night on a leaky air mattress in a hot, humid tent when I have a perfectly fine bed in an air-conditioned house?”   To be honest, I can understand where she is coming from. It’s based upon previous experience. One year we went camping for the weekend near Yankton, SD. We borrowed a tent from some friends. The first night it rained 1 ½ inches. The floor of the tent sloshed up and down like a waterbed without baffles. The water found every pinhole in the bottom of the tent, each of which seemed to be strategically placed so as to soak every sleeping bag. The next night it rained over 2 inches in just a little ov...